


The Last Bargain

by pipistrelle



Series: the wonder that's keeping the stars apart [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e23 Demons, F/M, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 16:19:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17206751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: An angsty episode tag to S4E23, "Demons".





	The Last Bargain

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying to clean and finish some old drafts, and found this in my own personal X-Files (lol). If you need some good old-fashioned angsty wallowing, this might be for you. Enjoy.

The cops and Scully insist on sending him to a hospital, where they keep him overnight, to reassure themselves that he's not going to cause damage to anything more valuable than the wall of an abandoned summer house. Somehow, miraculously, Scully manages to talk them into letting him go in the morning; when he stumbles bleary-eyed into the brilliant sunshine, she's waiting with their bags packed and their flights to DC booked from Logan airport. It's more than an hour's drive, but Scully won't let him touch the keys. "You should try and get some sleep," she tells him as she climbs into the driver's seat and pulls the seat up close to the steering wheel so she can reach the pedals.

He would have laughed at the idea of sleep, but then he finds himself waking up with the cool glass of the passenger window pressing against the side of his face. The car isn't moving. He vaguely recognizes the tree-lined corridor of 128, stretching still and quiet into the distance. Then he turns his head a fraction to glance at the dashboard clock, still groggy from a nap after days of drug hallucinations and sleep deprivation, and sees Scully. She's slumped back in the driver's seat with her eyes closed, pale as death, her right hand clenched in a vise grip on the steering wheel and the left one pressed to her temple.

"Scully," he blurts out. She doesn't open her eyes, doesn't move at all except for the slow clench of her jaw as she grinds her teeth against the terrible pain. This is new, these blinding headaches; at least, he thinks they're new. He's only been seeing them for the past few weeks, at first always accompanied by a nosebleed, but lately on their own, without warning. But what he sees doesn't mean anything. She might have been having these pains for weeks, months even, and hiding them from him until finally they got bad enough to overwhelm even her considerable fortitude.

She's breathing hard, almost gasping. Helpless and hating himself, he reaches out and rests his hand on her wrist, feeling the tension of the muscles as she grips the steering wheel, trying to use it as an anchor against the pain. He wraps his fingers loosely around her wrist, offering her another anchor, or giving her the space to pull away.

She doesn't pull away. She doesn't acknowledge him at all, just breathes, her jaw moving slowly, the fingers of her left hand digging into her temple in a useless gesture that won't do anything to relieve the agony rooted in the tumor at the base of her brain. Enduring. Enduring both his touch and the pain of her cancer. What's one more burden, after all?

"Scully," he says again, softly, caressing the underside of her wrist with his thumb, feeling her pulse flutter under the skin, soft as the beat of a butterfly's wing but much too fast.

She hisses out a sharp breath between her teeth, draws in a shuddering gasp, and on the exhale she manages, "I'm fine. I just need a minute."

He doesn't bother arguing, just strokes his thumb along her wrist again. "I can drive the rest of the way."

"No." The word costs her, and she has to breathe for a minute before she can keep going. "You might still -- have seizures. The ketamine --" she breaks off, barely managing to swallow a whimper of pain. He can see beads of sweat beginning to form at her hairline. Gently, he brings his free hand up under hers and pries her fingers away from the steering wheel, twining them with his own. He can be a better anchor for her than cold, unfeeling plastic. Immediately she digs her nails into his palm, and he lets her, just holding her hand between both of his, pressing lightly to give her something to focus on.

He can see the moment the pain begins to ease. Her features soften, her breathing evens out. She's still pale, but suddenly he realizes that he doesn't remember the last time she wasn't at least a little pale, a little worn, with those shadows like bruises under her eyes, so dark now that he can see them through the concealer she wears if he looks hard enough. Hidden, like all the other signs of her illness, meticulously but imperfectly; like the glimpse he once got of the top right-hand drawer of her desk, the stacks of papers almost but not quite concealing the bright orange pill bottles arranged in regimental rows. Like the shadows under her eyes, like the meals she leaves untouched, he pretended not to notice them.

He wants to think that he's strong enough to face any truth, but he knows now that that is a lie he tells himself, maybe the biggest one of all. He can't face this truth, the one she tries to hide from him but never quite can. He was so desperate to escape from it, from the here and now, that he let a dangerous quack drill holes in his skull.

Her eyes flutter open at last and she stares at him. He can't hold her gaze. Instead he looks at her hand, still held in both of his, now palm-up on the armrest between them. He runs his thumb slowly across the creases in her palm, wondering which one is the life line.

"Mulder," she says evenly, her voice as steady as it's ever been. "What are you doing?"

"You feeling better?" he asks.

"I'm fine."

It's almost funny, in a way, that he ended up pointing a gun at her. That he would even threaten to cut short the life that he would sell his very soul to save. He knows looking at her hand that he would buy her more time with years off his own life, if he could; that he would give all of his years, all the time he has left on earth, to give her a long healthy future, free of pain. He kisses her hand, a brief brush of the lips against the soft skin below her knuckles. "I'm sorry, Scully."

"You scared me," she says. She doesn't sound scared; she sounds tired. He darts a glance up at her face but it's unreadable. "Mulder, whatever this was -- some attempt to find the truth, some ridiculous pact with the Cassandras -- you can't do this again. Not ever." What she means is not even when I'm gone.

"I won't. Promise. I'm happy with the number of holes in my head." He flashes her a smile, but she's not smiling back. Not after this fresh hell he's put her through.

"I'm serious, Mulder." She tugs her hand out of his grip and runs her fingertips along his hairline, a brief, clinical touch, like she's checking the injection scars. He would believe that's what she's doing, except that her touch lingers just a second too long over the unbroken skin at his temple, where the muzzle of his gun had rested for hours while he sat alone in that dark house, chasing ghosts in his own head.

He waits until her hand drops into her lap, then looks up, meeting her faint frown with a smirk. "You always are, Scully," he says. It's meant to be gentle, teasing, but his own voice sounds too harsh in his ears and Scully still doesn't smile. The nauseating thought strikes him that someday, maybe someday soon, he's going to see her smile and it's going to be for the very last time.

She's right to worry about his habit of dealing with unconfrontable terror and agony by locking himself in a dark room with a gun. It's a coward's move, and the thought of losing her turns him into such a coward that he closes his eyes so he won't have to look at her, turning his head towards the window as she starts the car again and pulls back onto the empty highway.

His head feels like it's full of fog, with bright, darting flashes of pain that flicker in the dark behind his eyes like foxfire. His brain has dissolved into marsh gas, the choking miasma rising from years' worth of dead and rotting things. His mouth tastes like a swamp, too. He lets his head fall back against the window, then sits up straight again with a shudder as the vibration of the glass starts to remind him of the whine of the lowering drill.

"Mulder? You okay?"

"Yeah." He scrubs one hand across his aching eyes. "Next time I think about doing something stupid, Scully, remind me to tell you about it first so you can talk me out of it."

"With pleasure," she says dryly. Something in her voice makes him glance over and there, finally, is a hint of the smile he's been dying to see -- wry, sardonic, and beautiful as a sunrise.

For the thousandth time she's saved him, from himself as much as from any of their enemies. And even as the fear of losing her hollows out his chest, poisoning his blood with every beat of his heart, he knows that she isn't done saving him yet.


End file.
